Robots Can Disrupt Markets and Save Lives

Two hundred years ago, 90 percent of America's workforce was in farming. Today that number has dropped to 2 percent. Silicon Valley startup Blue River Technology is hoping to close the gap on the labor market with their LettuceBot. Cesar makes real time farming decisions on one California's biggest crops. This robot is attempting to disrupt a $1.4 billion dollar lettuce market.

 Lettuce is apparently no small market, and farming is clearly a labor-intensive effort.  But sophisticated algorithms in the LettuceBot can ensure the right spacing for optimal growth among lettuce plants.  It is costly technology, but Blue River carves its business model around service.  So here we have another example of why STEM education - science, technology, engineering and mathematics - are is critical for future (and current) jobs.  The LettuceBot may disrupt the market by supplanting low-skilled labor on the farm, and may - just may - improve the bottomline for farm owners.

  

Bloomberg looks at HyQ, a robot from Italy that may soon be saving lives after an earthquake strikes.

Humankind has evolved from a bent-over, hunched on all-fours ambulation, to an upright, two-legged one.  Moreover, with our seemingly boundless creativity and discipline, we have created sophisticated vehicles with wheels for speed and wings for flight.  But HyQ makes it clear that we have not surpassed the usefulness, and underrated sophistication, of an animal like sheep, or goat, or dog, especially in navigating rough, sloping terrain.  By all means, deploy such robots in a post-earthquake site.  It's quite costly technology, but with recent weather devastation in the northern Philippines and central Illinois, what country or state can afford to lose lives, instead?

WildCat is a four-legged robot being developed to run fast on all types of terrain. So far WildCat has run at about 16 mph on flat terrain using bounding and galloping gaits. The video shows WildCat's best performance so far. WildCat is being developed by Boston Dynamics with funding from DARPA's M3 program.

Similar to HyQ, Wildcat leverages the sophisticated anatomy and movement of four-legged animals, but this robot is built for speed.  I imagine that it already has military uses, as is, but with improved speed, agility and quiet, its applications can multiply easily.

Thank you for reading, and let me know what you think!

Ron Villejo, PhD